As folks who've experimented with the anti-biotic and anti-viral effects of silver can attest, its important that we do indeed start with nano-particles. Bigger particles tend to have a plating effect and tattoo under the skin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Except that the stripy particles used here are not real. Stellacci has been claiming to make these, but there are big doubts over the evidence:http://www.timeshighereducatio... [timeshighe...tion.co.uk]

Additional links: A big discussion has taken place on PubPeer following a pre-publication arXiv release of a paper (full disclosure: I'm a co-author on the second version of this paper). The paper is well worth a read, and should be coming out soon in PLoS One.

Taking a look at the paper, it doesn't appear that these results are highly dependent on the striped morphology, which, I agree, is dubious. These guys aren't using that, they're claiming a "checkerboard" shape.

I haven't read through the whole literature on this - are *all* of the patterns crap? Are there checkerboards, or just noise + STM artifacts?